A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.
Canadian Gunn’s American debut is the story of an anthropologist searching for the mother who abandoned her—in a mix of overwrought plot, deep thoughts, and anthropology.
Kate is in her early 30s, and her life is a mess: she’s been married, divorced, had numerous affairs, an abortion. She drinks too much, pops pills, and has been suspended from her teaching job because of inappropriate behavior. And naturally it’s not her fault—mother, father, stepmother are all responsible. When she learns that her stepmother Elaine has drowned, Kate finally goes back home to Twisp, Washington, which she’d left at 15, going to Canada to live with her aunt Rose when her father, Joe, married Elaine. She’d recently divorced Ray, an artist, whose teenaged daughter Patti also lives in Twisp with her own baby and husband Trevor. Once home, Kate learns that Elaine, who’d urgently wanted to talk to her before she died, turns out to have been the elder sister of her mother, Iris. Between fights with her father and bouts of heavy drinking, Kate looks through Iris’s possessions, examines old photos for clues, and places ads asking for information about Kate’s mother, who’d also had a son she put up for adoption. While Kate is busy investigating, Patti suddenly disappears, leaving her baby behind—and searchers find her body in a ravine. Patti’s disappearance and murder clumsily hint at possible parallels to Iris’s disappearance, as do the anecdotes about tribes—the Anasazi, Ik, and Tasaday—that, by becoming extinct, literally disappeared. Kate meets a woman who knew Iris when she ran off to India with her drug-addicted lover Danny. She also learns that Iris was hospitalized on her return when her behavior became erratic at home. Memories from the past return, especially the snowy day when Iris put four-year-old Kate outside in the snow while she met up again with Danny. It was the last time Kate saw her.
A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55192-486-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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